I've started my trip in Kotor because if you have time to visit only one place in Montenegro, this should be it. Cruise ships on their way from Venice to Greece stop here, and buses packed with tourists from Dubrovnik, about two hours north across the Croatian border, make this their destination for a day. Kotor sits at the head of the Bay of Kotor, which is technically not a bay but Europe's southernmost fjord. The dark waters are deep and cold, accommodating ocean-going vessels; three centuries before cruise ships, Peter the Great sent part of his navy here to train.

Look again at your map and you'll see that the bay is roughly the shape of a headless angel—imagine a triangular robe topped by two raised wings. On the ground, this irregular shape becomes dozens of surprising inlets and bays-within-bays. A drive around the bendy perimeter of the Bay of Kotor—through Italian-looking fishing villages like Prςanj and Perast, once strategic Venetian maritime colonies—is another favorite itinerary for anyone who wants to see Montenegro in a day or two. In many villages, you can pull over for a traditional lunch of fish-and-carrot soup and kebabs of shrimp, squid, and toadfish. Or you can swim out to a raft floating in the bay or sunbathe on the dozens of small-pebbled beaches. Or you can enter the cold dark of the many stone churches, where flickering candles reveal crimson and blue frescoes of Orthodox patriarchs and saints.

All around the bay, the mountains rise up from the shoreline, a meaningful line of connection between mountain and sea. Throughout the day, the mountain faces change color with the light. In the morning sun, they are as pale as the heart of a pink rose. Today, through the fog, greens and khakis camouflage the stones. In the long shadow of afternoon, the mountains can turn dark as eggplant. Yet at night they are always black. This of course is the origin of the country's name. As historian Elizabeth Roberts noted, a papal dispatch from 1053 records the first time it was used officially—Monte Nigro, the black mountain. No doubt Rome's emissaries first encountered the region after dark.

In the 1993 book Balkan Ghosts, Robert Kaplan writes that in the former Yugoslavia, history can be found underfoot. I think of this as I continue making my way down from the ramparts above Kotor, stepping cautiously on the slick paving stones. I share the path with a handful of tourists who have also come for the view. One man, blithely negotiating the wet steps in shorts, has slipped, and the blood running down his leg is a slash of red on his cold, white-pink shin. He doesn't seem to mind, but it's impossible not to see blood on the path to Kotor without thinking of the long history that has led me here. Halfway down, I stop at the tiny chapel of Our Lady of the Health, built on the hillside by survivors of the plague that devastated Kotor in 1572. Erected from rough-hewn white limestone, the elegant church is the size of a one-car garage. Its small portico offers shelter to those of us in need of drying out—a Russian and his Versaced wife; two girls from Ukraine, shivering in tube tops and tight jeans; a young Japanese couple in drooping slickers; me, taking notes. The chapel's iron gate is locked, but through the grillwork, I can see the blue altar and the figure of Mary. A lone lightbulb burns above, illuminating the folds of her robe. Among us is a pilgrim—an old woman shawled in black, a worn-down hand broom in her fist—who has scrambled up the hillside to pray on the steps of the chapel. A quartet of French women in drenched capris have hung their ponchos on the chapel gate to dry. "Bad idea," the pilgrim scolds. "Maria! Maria! No." I wonder if, in her mind, we're just another foreign legion coming down from the mountains to take Kotor.